Monday, August 8, 2011

Now that I've completed my first ultra I'm suppose to write a long and detailed report about my race, right? Isn't that what us ultra runners do?

Okay, let's see,
Um, well at first I felt good.
And then I felt really good.
And then I felt just plain ol' good again.
That lasted for a while.
And then I started feeling bad.
And then I did feel bad.
This only seemed to last for a while
because I started to feel good again
This lasted until a mile before the finish
Where I bonked.
But luckily,
in my pocket
I found some m&m's.
And then I finished feeling good again.
Somebody gave me a beer and then I felt great.

Here is a graph of my race on Saturday:

But for really this time...

That was fun.

It was meditative, calming, beautiful, lonely, exciting, painful, slow, and so many other things.

I found the course fascinating for reasons entirely different than what is advertised - running through the city dump, through a coal processing plant facility, scrambling through what is known as "slugfest" - miles of torn-up trails through a boggy, northern rockies forest.

My mom and I drove the 1750miles from Grande Cache to Woody Creek in two days. I got on my motorcycle the next morning and rode 400miles on my motorcycle to Salt Lake City for the Trail Runner Uphill challenge. I finished 2nd to Matt Byrne by .01miles. Rode 400 miles back.

Elephant legs... with all the great advice i received before the race, nobody seemed to mention the probability that I might come down with a bad case of elephant legs following the race.

Pikes is two weeks away. Trans Rockies immediately after where I'll be lining up with my Teammate Anna Frost. That's gonna be a hoot.

Here's some photos:

stuck in construction traffic, mom, enjoying a roadside snack

exhausted shoes - morning after

prayers for the death racers...

after 12 solid hours of running, i got edged out for third place in the teams.

Here's a story in the Aspen Daily News by Chad Abraham about the race.

And finally, for no particular reason - a panorama of the Athabasca Glacier off the highway headed up to Grande Cache.

I started running when I was in middle school. In high school I joined the cross-country team after a friend informed me that it was co-ed (the soccor team was not). My college running career was essentially non-existent as I was never able to run a time that would seccure a spot for me on to the CU running team. Things changed following a third missed attempt. I abandoned the type A approach to training that had been injuring me and leading me nowhere for a type B, run-as-you-feel philosophy. I won my first notable race a few months later at the age of 25.
For the past two years my running has taken me from the Rockies to the Appalacians, from the Empire State Building to the Fjords of Norway, from deep valley floors to high mountain tops.